Review: HBO's The Normal Heart Arrives Too Late To Beat Loudly Enough

Picture 9/11 happening over and over without anyone who wasn't directly affected apparently giving a damn, and you've got a fair notion of life and death in New York's gay community in the early years of the AIDS crisis. First staged in 1985, Larry Kramer's _The Normal Heart _is a product of that era, and while Kramer is hardly a modest man—if he were, the NYC death toll probably would have been higher—even he might acknowledge in his calmer moods that the play isn't a great work of art. That wasn't its intent.

Instead, Kramer's barely fictionalized dramatization of his own adamant role in organizing a political response to the epidemic is a hectoring hunk of agit-prop whose considerable residual power depends on our awareness of its truculent immediacy at the time. If _The Normal Heart _had been turned into a movie back in the 1980's—and fat chance, needless to say—the audience's cathartic anger and grief might have been overwhelming. But almost 30 years is a long time in any culture, gay or straight, and HBO's belated screen version of the play, which debuts Sunday, never finds a way to transcend the material's datedness and clunky dramaturgy.

The director, _Glee _creator Ryan Murphy, may not have realized that doing just that was a vital part of his job. The pity is that you can see how hard everyone else worked to pay tribute, starting with the now 78-year-old Kramer himself—who scripted the adaptation, and who knows darned well that _The Normal Heart, _along with the real-life history that inspired it, is his most enduring legacy. For all I know, Murphy didn't have much choice but to do it the way Kramer wanted it done, and Kramer plainly isn't too big even now on Wordsworth's definition of art as emotion recollected in tranquility.

Mark Ruffalo plays the author's stand-in, Ned Weeks—a moderately successful writer and born pain in the neck who finds his real calling when a mysterious "gay cancer" (as AIDS was first known) starts killing off his friends. He's first introduced glumly observing his pals' Fire Island sex romps before the crisis hits, which is a mite confusing unless you know that Kramer was a notorious killjoy about gay promiscuity even in the 1970s; his 1978 novel _Faggots _held out for true love as the antidote to bathhouses, glory holes and drugs. Once lives are at stake, he's a killjoy turned lifesaver.

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His main ally—well, in delivering firebrand 411, anyhow—is Julia Roberts as Dr. Emma Brookner, a wheelchair-bound polio victim turned raging medical crusader. Linking AIDS to polio is one of Kramer's shrewder moves, since the contrast between the resources expended on finding a polio vaccine in the 1950s and the pittances allotted to AIDS research in the 1980s couldn't be more tattletale. His use of his own Jewishness to augment the damning cross-references is more problematic, since at his wildest Kramer wasn't averse to accusing the U.S. government of abetting if not outright instigating a new anti-gay Holocaust. One paradoxical comfort of believing in conspiracies is that they allay a more realistic recognition of simple indifference.

In his own crowd, Ned is up against knuckleheads who refuse to believe the party's over, non-knuckleheads arguing that sexual freedom is the keystone of gay pride, and fellow members of the newly founded Gay Men's Health Crisis—Kramer didn't even bother to change the name— who try to reason with Ned that making nice with the powers that be is more effective than his in-your-face pugnaciousness. The actors incarnating various polemical points of view include a miscast Alfred Molina (who plays Ned's straight brother), Taylor Kitsch, and The Big Bang Theory's Jim Parsons, and no doubt it reflects the respect Kramer's play is legitimately owed that—like Ruffalo and Roberts—they all _wanted _to be in this thing. As stupid as it feels to have to praise an HBO movie in 2014 for forthrightly depicting gay eros, _The Normal Heart _does that too, in Ned's love scenes with his doomed one and only, a _New York Times _reporter played awfully well by Matt Bomer.

If the factional squabbles depicted here are common to all protest movements, the uniqueness is that sex, sexuality and sexual identity are the issues everyone's animated by—not just as a subject of urgent analysis, as was the case with 1970s feminism, but as a matter of literal survival. Yet now that these wrangles are three decades removed from the present tense, preserving them without adding hindsight's perspective makes for all sorts of forest-for-the-trees bogginess. Particularly since nobody's position except Weeks/Kramer's own is all that convincingly linked to their flimsily dramatized personalities, even gay viewers who weren't around back then—and never mind straight ones—are more likely to be baffled than riveted by the task of figuring out what everybody's wrought up about.

There's nothing wrong with Ruffalo's performance except that it's boring, for which I blame a script that doesn't exactly give him a hell of a lot of room for either variety or novelty. The play is basically an expository machine pretty crudely designed to give each character a climactic rant, and Roberts' performance—not at all bad up to then, BTW; am I going crazy, or has she improved in her old age?—doesn't recover from hers. Weeks/Kramer, however, is in rant mode more or less constantly, his scenes with his lover aside (and sometimes not even then). That doesn't give Ruffalo much choice except to badger the camera constantly in a weirdly Ben Gazzara-ish way, and yet you wouldn't have a clue why Weeks's arguments are more valid than anyone else's if he weren't so explicitly the hero.

The director also doesn't do either the cast or the material any favors by making pretty much every wrong stylistic choice that's available to him. People excoriating and upbraiding each other constantly may be powerful stuff onstage, but Murphy thinks he's got to emphasize the intensity instead of modulating it. While reminding us that all this happened a generation or two ago would add context and poignancy, the (often gauche) photography keeps trying for fake rawness instead. Since Murphy's same-sex credentials are in no doubt, it's also odd that the portrayals of gay hedonism play into homophobic stereotypes at times; if that's meant to reflect Kramer's mistrust of casual sex, it doesn't work. On top of that, the editing is often wretched, and some of the emotions Ruffalo is asked to register in the sledgehammer reaction shots would make any actor despair.

Not that I enjoy being curmudgeonly about this one, believe me. Since I've heard stories of people sobbing all the way through screenings of _The Normal Heart, _your own reaction is awfully likely to depend on your relationship to the real-life subject matter—always Kramer's ace in the hole. But my hunch is that a movie dramatizing the original play's genesis would tell us more—or move me more, anyhow—than adapting _The Normal Heart _itself has a chance to at this point. While I'm pretty sure Larry Kramer deserves a monument of some sort, just maybe it's a bit late in the day for him to insist on being its sculptor.

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